The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology.
Network Address Translation (NAT) is widely used as a method of efficiently utilizing the limited public Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) address space as well as providing additional endpoint security (e.g., in a firewall device) by hiding the real IP addresses. Service providers typically use extremely large pools of public IP addresses to service an even larger number of internal Internet-connected clients (user workstations, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and so on). Such NAT pools may be comprised of wide supernets, smaller subnets, and contiguous or discontiguous individual IP address ranges.